1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a document data processing method, document data creating apparatus, and a document data processing system. In particular, the invention relates to a document data processing method, document data creating apparatus, and a document data processing system which are suitably used for decoding encoded document data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data which is described in XML (extensible Markup Language) is text format data. Up to now, reading, writing, and saving of such data are performed based on the text format. The text format data is easy to handle for human beings. However, the data becomes redundant, and there is a problem that it takes time for a computer to perform reading and writing of the data. For this reason, a technology called binary XML has been used.
In the binary XML, each vocabulary such as an element name or an attribute name in the XML is replaced by a short code, thus providing data with small redundancy. For example, in Fast Infoset of Sun Microsystems, a number is allocated for each vocabulary such as the element name or the attribute name in the order of appearance in the XML data and each vocabulary is encoded. For example, according to Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-215951, an attribute name or an element is encoded through sorting in terms of data type such as an integer number and a character string.
In the binary XML, in order to decode the encoded data, it is necessary to use an encoding table that is a table representing a correspondence between a code and each vocabulary.
However, according to the above-described conventional technology, a single encoding table is allocated to the entire XML data. For this reason, as the number of types of vocabularies used in the XML data is larger, the size of the encoding table becomes larger. Therefore, an apparatus having a small usable memory area such as an inexpensive printer cannot hold the encoding table, and the encoded binary XML (each vocabulary) cannot be decoded in some cases.
As described above, according to the conventional technology, there is a problem that the document data described in a structured language for describing a document such as the XML (structured description language) may not be decoded by the apparatus having a small usable memory area.